Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  “What’s Nandiboon?”

  “Great stuff, Oil of Nandiboon. It heals anything real fast. A friend of mine brought it back from Nepal. Here. . . .” He reached into the blue pack and brought out a small flask, which he uncorked with his teeth. “I sort of feel responsible for you now.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Hardesty as the oil was smeared over his wound.

  “Don’t worry, it’s organic.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jesse Honey.”

  “What?”

  “Jesse . . . Honey. Honey is my last name. It’s not my fault. It could have been worse. I could have been a girl, and they could have named me Bunny, or Bea, or who the hell knows what. What’s your name?”

  “My name is Hardesty Marratta. What’s in this stuff? It’s beginning to sting.”

  “It does sting. But it heals real fast.”

  The pain from the Nandiboon Oil was on the rise, and Hardesty suspected that it would rise quite high. It did. Two or three minutes after it had been applied, the Nandiboon Oil was seething into his skin in thousands of boiling potholes. Whatever Nandiboon Oil was, it was a good imitation of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. Hardesty rolled in agony.

  “I’ll get some water,” screamed Jesse Honey. “There’s a stream crossing the switchback. I’ll catch you when you come this way up ahead.” Hardesty didn’t even hear him. But ten minutes later he saw Jesse Honey’s hand begging for assistance over the edge of the gondola car, and he went to help him. Jesse Honey threw a plastic jug of water into the train and grabbed Hardesty’s extended arm so hard that he dislocated it. Hardesty collapsed again. Jesse Honey seized his arm (the wrong one) and proceeded to relocate it according to the principles of first aid. But, since it was already located, he, in fact, dislocated it.

  “Are you trying to kill me?” Hardesty shouted. “Because if you are, I wish you would just get it over with.”

  Jesse Honey seemed not to hear, and went about relocating both of Hardesty’s arms. “I learned that on Mount McKinley,” he said, with evident satisfaction. Then he washed the Nandiboon Oil off Hardesty’s face, and jumped from the train once again. When he returned, he was carrying a huge pile of brushwood.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Gotta make a fire to boil water to cook the food and have tea,” Jesse Honey said, lighting up the kindling.

  “How can you make a fire on a wooden floor?” Hardesty asked, too late. The resinous floorboards had already caught fire, and flames were leaping in the wind. Jesse Honey tried to stamp them out, but when his greasy boots began to ignite, he withdrew.

  For half an hour the wind carried the fire to front and rear. Lubricating oil, paint, the wooden floors and interiors of boxcars, dunnage, and a thousand miscellaneous cargoes all took flame until finally the train was blazing in sheets of fire. The train crew discovered it too late to stop, and tried to make for the saddle of the mountains, where there was no wind. By the time they got there it was too hot for Jesse and Hardesty to stay on, so they jumped off and began walking east. As the sun set, they could see two red glows (the brighter being the conflagration on the train), and they heard periodic explosions marking the demise of tank cars laden with combustibles. According to Jesse Honey, it was all part of nature’s way. “Trains,” he said, “were never meant to be in the mountains.”

  FOR MOST of that night they walked along the length of cool valleys on the crest of the Sierra, where they found only starlight and the deep tranquillity of mountains in early summer. The silence of the trees and quiescence of the wind were nature’s hope and disbelief that winter had passed, a time when the wild terrain holds its breath before rejoicing, for fear of calling back the bright blue northers and the snow.

  At first, Hardesty and Jesse did not speak on the chalk-white paths that crossed blackened shafts of alpine defiles, and their eyes tracked the stars as they watched the rim of the mountains swallow them up. The air was springlike. It conveyed the same buoyant pleasure as walking into a gathering of little children, arrayed like wildflowers, in their colorful hats and scarves. As always on the first day at altitude, it was easy to walk all night, and besides, the air was so fresh and the streams so roiling, white, and numb that no living thing which knew joy or freedom could possibly have slept.

  As they walked north-northeast, the moon came up as creamy as pearl, perfectly round, benevolent, a flawless bright lantern. Jesse claimed that there was an excellent freight line in the direction that he insisted they follow, just a mile or two ahead. They had covered fifteen miles by the time the moon disappeared and the east brightened, and still there was no railroad. “There’s a beautiful bridge right over the track,” said Jesse, “made of logs and cables. I don’t know who built it, and I don’t know what for, but you can drop right onto the train with the greatest of ease.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Hardesty. “Why do you have to fall from above every time you get on a freight? Why not just run alongside and catch a rung?”

  Jesse looked at him with hurt and annoyance. “I can’t,” he stated bitterly. “I can’t reach high enough.”

  “Oh, I see,” Hardesty answered, glancing at his companion—who was breathtakingly short. “How tall are you, anyway?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “No difference. I’m just curious.”

  “Four-four and three-quarters. I was supposed to be six-three. That’s what the doctor said, from the spaces in my X-rays. My grandfather was six-six, my father six-eight, and my brothers are taller than that.”

  “What happened to you?”

  Jesse bristled. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “For a man who stands four feet five inches tall . . .”

  “I thought you said four-four and three-quarters,” interrupted Hardesty.

  “Drop dead,” Jesse snapped. “For a man who stands four feet five inches tall, this is a difficult world. When I read in the newspapers that they describe someone who’s five-eight as being of below average height, how do you think I feel? Girls won’t even look at me. Most of them don’t get the chance: they see right over my head. I wasn’t allowed to join the Army, though the Navy was eager to have me—as a chimney sweep. I went to college, I’m an engineer, and the Navy wanted me to sweep their goddamned chimneys. When big tall jerks strut around because they’re proud of how tall they are, I just want to take a machine gun. . . . It doesn’t matter. I don’t care anymore. What I need is a beautiful short woman in a little cabin near a low mountain range.”

  “I think that there are places like that in the Black Forest,” Hardesty said, “where, according to legend, at least, you might find what you’re looking for.”

  “No trolls,” said Jesse. “I was born American, and that cuts out trolls.”

  “No, no, no. I’m talking about pretty little blond blue-eyed women like you see on carved bottle stoppers.”

  “Not for me. I like California girls, slim and tall, the kind whose knees come up to my throat.”

  That day they covered forty miles in the full sun, talking about women, mountain climbing, freight trains, and politics. Jesse was an avid supporter of President Palmer (perhaps because he was the shortest president since Linscott Gregory), whereas Hardesty was willing to vote for him, but no more than that. They were self-consciously silent whenever they would cross the tree line, because there they would walk through vast stands of dwarf pine. Hardesty said he thought that he might have broken a bone when he cushioned Jesse’s landing.

  “Don’t you know?” asked Jesse.

  “No, I don’t. I never broke anything before.”

  “You never broke anything before! That’s crazy! I’ve broken nearly every bone in my body. Once, I forgot to anchor my rappel, and I broke sixteen bones at the same time. I was absentminded on the Grand, and belayed myself with a reepschnur, (That’s like using a shoelace.) Well, I took a forty-foot leader fall on that reepschnur, and I think I broke everything except my word, b
ecause, after the reepschnur snapped at forty feet, I kept falling for another three hundred and fifty.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t die.”

  “I hit a lot of ledges.”

  They came to a crystal-blue lake almost as long and narrow as a river. From atop a group of boulders on the south side, they could see the railroad line about a mile across the water. Jesse said that they would have to swim, but that because the lake was geothermal it was as warm as bathwater. Hardesty put his finger in, and disagreed. “Not on the edges!” Jesse exclaimed. “Any fool would know that geothermally warmed lakes are hot only in the deeper portions. That’s where all the heat exchange takes place. Several tons of refrigerated thermal currents activate an ion-intensive, BTU-rich wave transfer beginning at the upwelling parameters of the tollopsoid region of the deepest central subset. Thus, the agitated interference pattern of air-influenced temperature variations forces a haploid grid upon the dimensional flows of surface water trapped in an oscillating torroidal belt that varies only with alkaloid surfactant inversions of normal stability caused by drought-induced desiccant concentrations due to insufficient intra-aqueous leaching.”

  “Still,” said Hardesty, “we might do better to walk around.”

  “Not a chance. The railroad is not even tangential to the lake. It veers down from the northwest and veers up again to the northeast, because they built it that way in the days when they needed to top off the boilers of steam engines. The lake is fifty miles long, and this is the central part of it. Besides, even if we walked to one end, we’d still have to cross a river, and crossing a river is a hell of a lot more complicated—believe me—than crossing a lake. At least the lake stands still.”

  Apart from his explanation of why the lake was warmer in the middle than at its edges, what Jesse said sounded reasonable. So they set to building a raft on which to float their clothes and belongings as they swam.

  “That’s hardwood,” pronounced Hardesty over a bunch of logs that Jesse was dragging toward the assembly point on the beach. (Jesse himself could hardly be seen through the thicket of gray—he looked like a porcupine with a purple skin disease.) “It won’t float.”

  “Hardwood? Ha! This is Montana balsam. It’s what they use in the interior of dirigibles and such. Of course it will float.”

  They lashed it together with spare reepschnur cord, and pushed it from the rocks into the water, never to see it again, for it went down like heavy chain. Then they started to swim. The sun was setting, but they had decided to get wet anyway, and build a big fire on the other side, since there was plenty of Montana balsam all around. Jesse said it wouldn’t burn, which assured Hardesty of a comfortable blaze by which to warm himself.

  Wrapping their clothes in bundles to put on top of their knapsacks, they prepared to set out across the water, knapsacks balanced on their shoulders. In theory, only the bottom of the packs would get wet. But that theory lasted only for the ten minutes that they could swim fast. Then, at the center of the lake, they sank deeper into the water, and everything got drenched. The water there was as cold as a mountain stream at midnight on the last day of January. The colder they got, the faster Jesse talked in what sounded like a high-speed collision between a physics textbook and a politician.

  “I know this may sound like an excuse,” he said. “But tensor functions in higher differential topology, as exemplified by application of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem to Todd Polynomials, indicate that cohometric axial rotation in nonadiabatic thermal upwelling can, by random inference derived from translational equilibrium aggregates, array in obverse transitional order the thermodynamic characteristics of a transactional plasma undergoing negative entropy conversions.”

  “Why don’t you just shut up,” said Hardesty.

  Jesse didn’t open his mouth until the frame he made to hold his clothes near their fire collapsed, and his purple knickers burned up. From that time forward, he went bare below the waist except for a New Guinea style penis shield that he fashioned from a discarded Dr Pepper can and hung from his waist on a piece of reepschnur. He soon took to extolling this form of dress as if he were a Seventh Avenue designer introducing a new line. “It’s very comfortable,” he said. “You should try it.”

  Two hours after the fire burned out, a thundering mass of steel wheels and coughing diesels swung by the lakeshore, and Jesse and Hardesty found a comfortable flatcar to carry them toward Yellowstone. Hardesty got up first, and Jesse ran by the side of the tracks, flagging dangerously, until Hardesty hoisted him aboard. Hardesty was easily able to see him, because his buttocks shone in the light of the moon. Twenty-four hours later they jumped off the train rather than ride north into Montana and Canada, walked for a while, and then were stopped by what they thought was the Yellowstone River.

  Hardesty looked up at the sky, which seemed to be threatening rain. “Why don’t we build a shelter, and see what we can do about crossing this river tomorrow?” he said. “I think it’s going to rain.”

  “Rain! You think that looks like rain?” Jesse asked. “Obviously, you never were in the mountains for very long. I know that it can’t rain. Do you know what infallibility is? I’ll tell you: it’s me predicting the weather.” He glanced at the huge cumulonimbus clouds rolling toward them from the north in a mountainlike wall that shredded up the moonlight. “That’s going to pass in five minutes. Tonight will be pure velvet. Stretch out on the pine needles and sleep.”

  “I don’t know,” Hardesty said, wary of the clouds.

  “Trust me.”

  Half an hour after they had fallen asleep, a crack of thunder popped them up from the ground where they had been lying and turned them over like flapjacks. Lightning struck in machine-gun reports, felling trees. The river, which had already been a whipping, dashing flume, was now so fast and white that it looked like a streak of lightning itself. And the rain that came down was not ordinary rain that falls in inoffensive drops. Hardesty and Jesse tried as best they could not to drown. “Follow me,” Jesse said through a mouthful of water.

  “What for?”

  “I know where there’s shelter. I saw it on the way in.”

  They swam uphill for a few hundred yards until they got to the entrance of a cave.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” Hardesty proclaimed, although he knew he would go in.

  “Why not? It’s perfectly safe.”

  “I’ve always hated caves. I guess it’s because I’m Italian.”

  “Come on. I’ve been in this cave before, I think. If I remember correctly, a hermit used to live here, and he left a couple of nice feather beds, supplies, furniture, and lamps.”

  “Sure,” Hardesty said, as darkness swallowed them up. “Why do we have to go in so far?”

  “To get to the hermit’s place.”

  “What about bats?”

  “There aren’t any bats west of the Platte.”

  “That’s not true. I’ve seen bats in San Francisco.”

  “Or east of Fresno.”

  After twenty minutes of groping along dark paths in a hissing subworld of hidden streams and mocking echoes, they came to what they sensed was a great chamber, for the sounds of their footsteps fled away from them as if into the open air. They felt vast space above and to the sides, and no matter which way they walked they found no walls but only level floor of rock and earth. They crossed small well-behaved streams as warm as bathwater and saw in them glowing chains of phosphorescent creatures.

  How strange it was to see these things that made their own light, blinking by the hundreds of thousands in busy silent codes. They seemed like an army of dedicated workers absorbed in preparations for an unspecified journey. Batteries of little lights that racked up billions upon billions of permutations and combinations seemed to be driving unhindered toward some mysterious goal.

  For hours, or perhaps days, Hardesty and his guide wandered on the plain of lighted streams. Jesse completely forgot about the hermit’s place. All they cared for was the color, th
e endless map of calculating rivulets, and the routes of tranquillity and silence that they followed into pitch-black emptiness. Like musical tones, the streams mixed and separated. Hardesty clutched the small pack in which he carried the salver. At one point, they stood in the middle of a glowing plain so vast that they wondered if, in fact, they were still alive.

  But eventually they had to think about returning to the surface. Hardesty suggested that they walk against the flow of the largest stream. That way, they would at least be going up. Soon the other streams in the luminescent net began to drop away, the one they followed grew larger, the phosphorescence gradually disappeared, and they found themselves in a huge chamber at a distant end of which flashes of lightning were visible through an opening.

  “This is perfect,” Jesse said. “A nice soft floor, dry, and the exit is right over there. Let’s go to sleep.”

  “Don’t you think,” Hardesty asked, “that we should light a match, to see what’s in here?”

  “What could be in here? There’s nothing in here.”

  “I don’t want to go to sleep without knowing what’s around me.”

  “That’s stupid,” Jesse yelled. “Hey! Whatever’s in here, to hell with you! Go to hell! Kill us if you like! Arrragghh!” For a small man, he had a miraculous voice. The challenges made Hardesty’s ears ring.

  “Even so,” Hardesty said, searching in his pack for a box of matches, “I want to take a look.”

  He struck a match. At first the white-and-blue spark blinded them, but then the golden flame strengthened, and they looked up.

  “I see,” Hardesty said quietly.

  In lines as neat and well ordered as the rows of cardinals seated at an ecumenical council, were a hundred or more surprised, temporarily blinded, twelve-foot-high grizzly bears. Not knowing what to think of the two strangers who had come into their midst, they turned to each other for advice, pawed the air, and rotated their heads in confusion.

  Hoping to keep away the bears, Hardesty lit as many matches as he could hold in his palpitating fingers. The augmented light enabled him to see the bats. The bats, not surprisingly, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, or in the millions. They clung to the roof of the cave in a solid mass several bats deep; they were the size of the broken umbrellas that one sees stuffed in trash cans on a windy day; and their ears and joints were hideously purple and pink. They began to move in a growing chain reaction which prompted the bears to roar, showing white teeth as sharp as a splintered hayrack.